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Poetry Review: David Merrit’s Crisis & Duplication

I am thinking of creating (private) lists of books to read in particular circumstances. For example what to read when you have no power or running water and can only read by candlelight after a day consumed with slow-paced domestic chores. Thrillers worked for me.

And David Merrit’s Crisis & Duplication. I sat on the couch in the grey gloom and read it three times in a row. It is a slender chapbook published by Compound Press last year.

The book is in two halves with a foldout centrepiece. The first half draws Frank Sargeson into the poet’s musing self-reflective quick-fire monologue. It is sharp, angular and surprising.

I always seem to be writing poems in Wellington

sunlight on a cold but bright winter’s day. I will

be outside a cafe in reflected mirror glass, dodging

bullets, writing inbetween showers & dristy

mizzle.

David is musing on the mirror image: himself and Frank, the connections, the writing surges and space for improvement. It is audacious, spiky, riveting.

It’s an easy poem this, preordained, quick

off the tongue, one poet, very alive,

400 miles south for now, compares life

& times with another poet, 60 years

ago still alive & kicking, a Janet Frame

tucked away in a back shed, her glittering

far away eyes focused on her own escape,

‘cept you like me, we never escaped to

the place they call overseas.

The second half navigates the stages of making a book – not a big press book but a grassroots number. A miniature history of desktop publishing. It is risograph printed and bound with premium banana box card. Excellent to look at and hold.

So what do I do in a mini crisis? Will I set up invented conversations with someone who has affected me (also in the garden? writing poems? reading books?)? Is the occasion of writing a poem a crisis for some? A tilt, a topple, a brief epiphany?

To what degree is a poem a duplication?

In the grey gloom with no idea when the lights would be on, the spaghetti effect of questions was extremely welcome. Then again so was the downright admiration of the words on the line.